02 April 2013

I'm both pleased and honoured that expat Canadian writer Mark Reynolds has contributed this, the very first Dusty Bookcase guest post. More of Mark's writing can be found online at View of the Marching Fishes.

When Brian offered me the opportunity to write a guest-post on The
Sixth of December by Jim Lotz, I jumped at the chance. It struck me
as inspired that someone had thought to link Trotsky’s brief imprisonment
in Nova Scotia to the Halifax Explosion. I imagined a Communist of
Unrequited Dreams, or perhaps a Forrest Gumpsky –
here Trotsky founds the Red Army, there he blows up Halifax, and during his New
York exile he advises a young F. Scott Fitzgerald on writing fiction.

The Sixth of December starts 11 months before the
titular date, 100 meters under the Atlantic, where a German U-Boat and its crew
lay slowly dying. Warships of the Royal Navy prowl the surface, drawing their
net of depth charges ever closer on the helpless sailors below.

Finally, Kapitanleutnant Wolfgang Von Lothringen – aristocrat, conveniently
English-educated, fanatic in the cause of the Fatherland – makes a desperate
decision to make a break for it, surfacing his vessel and firing his last
torpedo at his tormentors. However, the torpedo misfires and U-42 is destroyed.
Von Lothringen survives, along with one crew member – Lothar Brutcher – and a
Scottish merchant captain unwillingly aboard as a prisoner. The other 30
sailors under his command die, never to trouble the narrative or the conscience
of their captain again.

As an opening scene, it’s a doozy, and it contains within it all the
best and worst that the book had to offer. I believe the opening dialogue is
best excused by the fact that both the characters were desperately starved of
oxygen when speaking it:

”Do you see this?” [Von Lothringen]
asked, pulling a cigarette case out of his pocket and thrusting under the nose
of the Scot. “Made of steel, from the battlefield of Verdun. My brother and his
regiment went in with the first wave on February 21 last year. Only ten men
came out alive. One of them made this for me – in memory of my brother. Then he
went back and was killed.”

The Scot shook his head. “You’re a stubborn lot, you Germans.”

On the other hand, while the
means by which Von Lothringen was trapped by the Royal Navy was similarly hard
to believe, it turned out to have been based on fact.

Indeed, as I read on, it turned out that there was very little
outside of the doings of the main characters in The Sixth of December that was not
based on fact. The book might be that rarest creature of all – a historical
fiction that does not fictionalize any of the history. That
speaks well of Lotz’s professional standards – he is still, as far as I am
aware, an active author of Maritimes history. The man clearly loves Nova Scotia
and its past; I learned a great deal from The Sixth of December,
but learning was not what I was hoping to gain from a book that promised “The
Terrorist Plot of the Century!”

Lotz’s fidelity to the Muse of History puts some unfortunate
constraints on the story. Leon Trotsky would have made a fairly compelling
arch-villain for such a book, had Lotz been willing to depart from the record
on occasion. Lotz was not, so the founder of the Red Army disappears from the
narrative about one third of the way through. As Trotsky took his leave of the
Amherst prisoner of war camp seven months before the Imo and
Mont Blanc collided, I didn’t exactly expect him to be
cackling from atop the town clock as Halifax burned, but readers might have
appreciated a coded telegram or two, or a least a spit-take from the Kremlin.

Leon Trotsky, St Petersburg, May 1917, weeks after being released from the Amherst camp.

Trotsky entered Halifax by chance, a transit point en route
to the Russian Revolution in which he was anxious to play his part (“an
unknown exile now, within a year this man’s name would be on the lips of all.
And he would leave a lasting mark on history.”) Realizing Halifax’s
strategic importance, he orders his companions to gather as much information as
they could on the harbour’s defenses.

The reasoning for this was somewhat convoluted: Trotsky
planned to pull Russia out of the war, which he believed would both cause the
Allies to lose, and also to intervene in the Revolution. If the latter
occurred, he believed the Allies would use Halifax as a staging port (those who
know of the Siberian Expeditionary Force will realize he
was not entirely wrong in this, but that adventure launched from the West
Coast). American involvement in the War both obviated and added urgency to the
plot, in ways I cannot wrap my head around even after three readings of the
explanation.

After Trotsky is detained, that justification was jettisoned in favour
of revenge against the Canadians for the indignity of his imprisonment. In his
brief time in Amherst (less than a month) he managed to convert a number of the
other prisoners to socialism, and hatched an escape plot with the most
promising of them – Von Lothringen among them. Trotsky’s powers of persuasion in
such a brief period against enemy sailors were also hard to believe, but again, the rendering was scrupulously true.

Trotsky’s arrival date in Amherst (April 6,1917) was tantalizingly
near that of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, and so that event makes an appearance as
well. Our hero, Sergeant Jack Dobney, a North-End Halifax boy strong of jaw and
stalwart of heart, fights his way though the battle, only to “catch a Blighty.”
In the dressing station he meets pure-hearted but strong-willed Beth, a
privileged South-End beauty serving near the front as a nurse. Sparks fly. I
suspect the headiness of the moment could only have been amplified by an unnamed
future author of high-school textbooks in the background of their burgeoning
romance observing that “They’ll say that this is the day that Canada became a
nation.”

Dobney’s wound is his ticket back to Halifax and, compelled by the
conventions of the genre, Beth follows shortly after. Dobney is eventually
enmeshed in a military police investigation involving supplies intended for the
front going missing from the docks. Meanwhile, back in Amherst, Von Lothringen,
Brutcher, and Kurt Hafner (another German submariner) escape. Von Lothringen
makes it to Halifax, where he spends the next few months establishing himself
as a bon vivant Swedish count, aided by money and materiel
supplied by the apparently pervasive Communist underground active in Halifax at
the time. The various deus ex Bolsheva means by which our
fugitive’s adventures were furthered were always attributed by them in
marveling tones to Trotsky, though again, the author refuses to trifle with the
historical record enough to detail his involvement.

The Canada Car and Foundry Co., Amherst, Nova Scotia, in 1931. Fourteen years earlier it served as the prisoner of war camp at which Trotsky was held.

Brutcher and Hafner have a harder time of it, escaping in a dory,
but getting caught in a squall on the Bay of Fundy. The boat capsizes and they
are separated, with Brutcher swimming for shore, though the exigencies of his
situation did not block his capacity to recall geography trivia (“Dimly, Lothar
remembered that this Bay had the highest tides in the world”). Lucky Lothar is
rescued by a simple Acadian girl, learning her name (Monique) at the top of
page 138 and falling into her bed at the bottom of page 139. The fanatic Hafner
recalls him to his duty two pages later (he spent that time murdering a priest),
but in the interim we learn much about Acadian history, in which Lotz was
unable to resist forcing Monique to deliver some awkward exposition on the
story of Legless Jerome.

Once the three Germans are reunited in Halifax, and Jack Dobney is
undercover attempting to tease out the nature of the conspiracy, Lotz dispenses
with most of the Nova Scotia sightseeing and historical trivia in favour of
what I can happily report is a fairly engrossing cat-and-mouse game, the stakes
of which are all the more foreboding for being known. The meticulous research
(mostly) aids the plot and heightens the tension, rather than distracting from
it as in the earlier pages. Unsuspected nuances of character appear, much to
the book’s benefit.

But… but but but. The Terrorist Plot of the Century? The smiling
face of Trotsky rising from the smoke of the Mont Blanc on
the cover? Well, poor Mr Lotz set himself an impossible challenge. How does one
turn the Halifax Explosion into the Terrorist Plot of the Century without
altering a word of the historic record? That, alas, was a circle even 2,300
tons of pitric acid, 200 tons of TNT and 35 tons of benzene could not square. The
German saboteurs failed in their own attempt to blow up the Mont
Blanc (on December 5th), but did contrive to make it on to
the bridge of the Imo just as the two ships were heading
towards each other in the Halifax Harbour Narrows. It proved to be an excellent
vantage point to watch Halifax be destroyed, with almost no effort required on
their part.

About Me

A writer, ghostwriter, écrivain public, literary historian and bibliophile, I'm the author of Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit (Knopf, 2003), and A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Translator, Memoirist and Pornographer (McGill-Queen's, 2011; shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize). I've edited over a dozen books, including The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco (Véhicule, 2013) and George Fetherling's The Writing Life: Journals 1975-2005 (McGill-Queen's, 2013). I currently serve as series editor for Ricochet Books and am a contributing editor for Canadian Notes & Queries. My latest book is The Dusty Bookcase (Biblioasis, 2017), a collection of revised and expanded reviews first published here and elsewhere.